TheMotion Theme Review - Should Vloggers use it?

If you’re in the business of setting up an ecommerce shop with WordPress - there’s no better option than setting a site using WooCommerce. There’s another thing which you need to focus on though - the visuals of your site - and that’s why you’ll need to find a great WordPress theme which is WooCommerce enabled. If you’re planning video blogging, or vlogging as part of your setup, you’ll also need a theme which supports this - and that’s where TheMotion theme comes into play.

But before we continue with WooCommerce, WordPress themes, TheMotion and vlogging - let’s tell you a bit of a story.

We’ve got a friend who has a pastime of making candles. It is actually one of her primary passions. Ever the entrepreneur and wishing the best success for all our friends, we suggested a great business idea with plenty of potential – why not vlog while you make your candles, set an online shop with your beautiful creations and open your business to a world of opportunity and a massive online market?

By setting up a video blog about your candle making, showing how fascinating it is to make them, weaving in your passion and emotion into the videos, you’ll not be just selling a product - you’ll be selling the story of candle-making! That’s a great way of putting a personal touch into a product.

This is why we think video blogging is such a great idea - and why we’re having a look at TheMotion theme from ThemeIsle.

TheMotion is a minimal theme for a reason - the focus is not on the “beauty” of the site, but on the videos on the site. Everything is focused around the vlogs on the site rather than the site per se. The theme is a “placeholder” for the real content - the video blogs.

In this review, we’re focusing on TheMotion WordPress theme and whether it’s a good idea to use it for your video blogging site.

Let’s find out if ‘TheMotion’ is fit to set your business in motion too!

A Quick Summary

What will this TheMotion review focus on?

For the sake of clarity and consistency, our review will be looking at a few important criteria.

Easy of use

Design/Features

Support

Value for Money

You will find a rating on a scale of 1-100 at the end of each category, with 100 being the best rating and 1 obviously being the worst.

Before you have a look at our review, you might want to go straight to their demo and have a quick look at the theme.

Besides what it looks like, you might want to check out how things work in the backend, using the admin demo. The demo allows you to tinker with the theme as much as you want, so that you can determine whether The Motion is right for you (or not).

Design and features - what can I achieve with TheMotion theme?

Just like we said - this is not one of those themes which have an instant visual impact - that’s because the idea is that the focus is on the videos rather than the site itself.

The design itself is pretty simple - with two main parts to the site’s home page.

A primary “slider-like” feature which promotes the videos you want to give most attention to.

There is then a secondary listing of vlogs which are still quite prominent but below the fold. These would typically be videos you’re recently posted.

That’s one version of the Home Page - there’s the second version too which is pretty much a banner with a call to action, followed by a series of videos.

Regarding features, TheMotion comes with the stuff you’d be expected to find in a premium theme.

Let’s go through a quick run-through of some of the main features of TheMotion theme

Customization of site identity for primary logo and links

Color palette for applying your company’s brand colors to the theme

Social media icons at the very top - to give prominence to your social media - something we believe is very important

2 pre-built homepage layouts - one, HomePage A is a top slider-like function showing a few videos at the top, with listings of other videos at the bottom. HomePage B has a banner at the top guiding the user to a specific part of the site whilst then giving very good focus to a number of videos below that.

Possibility to fully customizing the About and Contact pages

Customization of the video content of the footer

Insertion of a background image

Customization of widgets and menus

Given that TheMotion focuses on video-blogging and gives prominence to videos in every section, we believe this is a great choice as a video blogging theme.

Rating: 95

Ease of customization - can I get things done quickly?

Let’s just say that each WordPress theme you use requires some getting used to. If you want to avoid that learning curve and not have to understand a specific theme’s way of doing things, you might want to stick with the same theme company.

Customizing text and other simple changes and personalization of the elements using the Customize functionality is pretty simple and straightforward.

Working on the actual Admin demo setup by ThemeIsle makes for very easy customization. Going beyond the preset options cannot be done from the “Customize” functions. You’ll need to get right into the pages themselves and customize accordingly. When we installed a bare-bones version of the theme, setting it up to look like the theme demo required a bit of getting used to.

That’s a learning curve which has to happen with any theme you buy - you’ll find that the demo of the theme as opposed to what you get when you install the theme the very first time is going to be a very different experience - so do set your expectations right. The good thing is that you can import a Demo setup and then customize this as necessary.

If you want to be able to use the functions available in the “Customize” function of the theme, you’ll need to setup pages which are associated to those functions.

We wanted to get quite as close to the demo site as possible so we what we did is this:

Created a page based on the Home Page template

Created a page based on the About Us template

Create a page based on the Contact Us template

Another page based on the left side bar

We didn’t touch any of the content in the pages we created but popped right back into the “Customize” feature. We changed a few things here and there to sample what could be customized.

Then we added a few menu items to the pages we had just created.

By doing this, we got pretty close to the demo in a few minutes.

Obviously, you won’t be able to add new elements to the page from the “Customize” function - in fact, if you’re used to using such page builders as Divi and Pagelines page builders, you will find that this way of creating/changing the content is a little bit quirky.

Certain elements of the pages can be toggled on and off. There is a small checkbox on the side edit panel - which when enabled will hide that specific element from the page.

All of the features mentioned in the first section (such as the About Us Page) can be customized using the TheMotion’s “Customize” function and that is of course very easy.

The side edit panel gives you the ability to change nearly everything about section of a page: titles, texts, background images, subscribe URLs, which categories of videos to show, CTAs and much more.

As an example, the ‘About Us’ page has a pretty standard Statistics section. You’ll be able to fully customize the stat figures and their respective texts.

Another thing we find quite nice is the ability to customize the various CTAs in the page. Whether this is a subscribe or a Buy Now button - you’ll find that the way the CTAs are ever-present makes it great for guiding your visitors to the next actions.

Rating: 85

Support - where do I go when I’m stuck?

Like most of the larger theme providers, ThemeIsle provides six months of support as part of the price of the purchase of TheMotion them and handle support through tickets which are typically attended to in less that 24 hours with the first response generally solving the problem straight away.

Besides this, they’ve got a great documentation section with 50+ theme specific documents, a forum with active support threads and more than 20 video tutorials. Their documentation walks you through the most common functions step-by-step using full screenshots. So even if you are working with a WordPress theme for the first time, you will have ample resources at your disposal.

You’ll also find that clients of TheMotion are really happy with it:

Rating: 95

Pricing: is it value for your money?

The theme costs $79. That means it’s not one of the cheapest themes out there.

Yet - the way that it blends video into the theme makes it a great theme for those who want to focus primarily on video blogging.

At such a price, other themes would typically bundle such premium items such as a pagebuilder or other items.

Truth be told - $79 is not cheap for a theme. In the grand scheme of things, paying an additional $10 or $20 for a theme is not going to break the bank - yet comparing TheMotion to the typical price of a theme makes it look expensive.

Rating: 50

Should you be using it?

If you’re looking to get started quickly with a theme which is specifically focused around video blogging, TheMotion is a great choice. It gives your videos top priority and then blends in other necessary items seamlessly. Its integration with WooCommerce, fast-loading times, elegant, stylish but minimal design means it serves its purpose very nicely. All-in-all, TheMotion is a good choice for a video blogging site and will ensure you get started in next to no-time.

One more thing... Did you know that people who share useful stuff like this post look AWESOME too? ;-) Please leave a useful comment with your thoughts, then share this on your Facebook group(s) who would find this useful and let's reap the benefits together. Thank you for sharing and being nice!

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